Western Standard - November 01, 2026


HANNAFORD： What？ Get rid of the Indian Act？

THE PIPELINE： Is Danielle Smith facing a real UCP rebellion？ Alberta Voted for Immigration Reform. So Where Are the Bills？

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Length

25 minutes

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3,337

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196

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1

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show
00:00:20.600 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, October the 28th. Canada's only indigenous leader,
00:00:26.940 Manitoba Premier Wob Canoes says it's time to get rid of the Indian Act.
00:00:32.680 Then Prime Minister Mark Carney seems to say yes and then pulls back
00:00:37.620 and says it can be reformed but probably won't be abolished.
00:00:42.420 Many conservatives have been wanting to get rid of the Indian Act for decades.
00:00:47.140 But now the left is saying so because Wob Canoes is NDP.
00:00:51.800 Should we care?
00:00:52.620 With me today is retired Manitoba Judge Brian Giesbrecht.
00:00:56.940 who closely follows Canada's Indigenous file. He was also the Western Standards Columnist of the
00:01:02.700 Year in 2024. Many of those columns dealt with Indigenous issues. Good to have you on the show
00:01:09.260 at last, Brian. Well, thank you, Nigel. Nice to be here. Ah, good. Brian, several questions arise.
00:01:17.580 You told me something that I was unaware of, and that is that when it was implemented,
00:01:23.100 the separate system was only ever meant to be temporary. I didn't know that. So if it
00:01:30.860 was meant to be temporary, how did it get to be permanent? And why is it still with us 150 years
00:01:36.540 later? Well, our founders wanted a Canada with equal rights for everyone. And the problem was
00:01:47.580 that Indians of the Northwest were in a terrible state when Canada became a nation. That wasn't
00:01:57.320 their fault. The loss of the buffalo, disease and warfare, whiskey traders, etc., they were
00:02:05.720 actually in danger of disappearing. And the founders believed that they should be protected
00:02:16.060 until they could become mainstream Canadians.
00:02:20.340 So they designed reserves as places of temporary sanctuary,
00:02:25.140 and they designed the status system 0.98
00:02:27.400 where an Indian would be in the status, a junior status.
00:02:33.520 They were considered wards and tutelage, 1.00
00:02:36.440 which means like children in school.
00:02:38.760 But not all Indians,
00:02:40.640 if an Indian had graduated from a university,
00:02:43.780 was a doctor, minister, et cetera, 0.94
00:02:45.600 that person would not be eligible to be status. And that was not meant as a punishment. That was
00:02:53.000 meant as a sign that that person had graduated and could become a Canadian citizen. And the idea
00:03:00.720 was that there should be assimilation through enfranchisement. Now, being an enfranchised
00:03:08.020 person does not just mean, in the case of an Indian, getting the vote. It means becoming
00:03:13.180 a Canadian citizen in all respects.
00:03:17.040 So that was the idea.
00:03:18.340 It didn't work out.
00:03:19.620 The idea was that Indians would be kind of just mainstream Canadians
00:03:23.900 and reserves would sort of naturally disappear 0.62
00:03:27.580 because an enfranchised Indian would get his share of the band proceeds.
00:03:33.700 And he would also get 50 acres of land on the reserve.
00:03:38.160 And he could then sell that if he wished.
00:03:40.420 a farmer from the surrounding community could move in, and gradually reserves would not be
00:03:47.700 necessary. They would just merge with existing municipalities. And Indians would just be
00:03:54.020 regular Canadians. We would not have what we have today with reserves. I won't go into the weeds 1.00
00:04:01.700 too much to show why that didn't work, but the main reason was because the chiefs resisted. They
00:04:07.220 They did not want to give up the land on the reserves.
00:04:11.840 They did not want to give up their banned proceeds.
00:04:17.880 And they resisted. 0.89
00:04:19.440 The Indians definitely resisted because they wanted to hold on to their special, distinctive Indian status. 0.96
00:04:27.240 So that's where we are today. 0.99
00:04:29.060 But the whole system was designed to be a temporary thing.
00:04:32.860 And we should not be in this position today.
00:04:35.860 And when we hear about Pierre Trudeau trying to get rid of the Indian system in 1969, that was not a radical step. 0.64
00:04:45.500 That was just a natural development of a Canadian government policy where they wanted Indians to merge with the general population.
00:04:54.820 So, Brian, how many Indians were affected by these policies back in 1876 when the policy was brought in?
00:05:03.080 Well, the numbers are not known for sure, but let's remember that Rupert's Land was given over to Canada in 1870, and Rupert's Land was just a vast territory.
00:05:20.160 and basically there were no government services there for anybody.
00:05:25.460 But there might have been 40,000 Indians on the prairie provinces
00:05:33.360 and there were, you know, a similar type of population in British Columbia.
00:05:43.260 But the numbers were not great.
00:05:47.580 It would probably be 10 times that now, wouldn't it?
00:05:50.160 Oh yes, absolutely. The population has ballooned.
00:05:54.320 You were mentioning that if an indigenous person had been to university or perhaps
00:06:00.800 had served in the military, that they would be considered a citizen right away. I mean,
00:06:07.440 were there very many who were exempted from this process because they had already achieved those
00:06:13.360 things? Yes, there were definitely quite a few. And women, of course, and this sounds very
00:06:20.620 discriminatory. And after the Charter of Rice, it was ruled to be discrimination. But a woman who
00:06:26.840 married an Indian man would lose her status. It's very odd. A woman who would marry an Indian man
00:06:36.540 would lose her status, but an Indian man who married a white woman, that white woman would 0.66
00:06:45.300 gain status. So this all made sense at the time to them. In other words, the government was always
00:06:51.920 seeing status as something to get rid of, to gradually eliminate in time so that Indians could 0.99
00:06:58.460 be assimilated. That word assimilated has become a bad word in Canada when speaking with, because
00:07:05.840 that is always conflated with forced assimilation. But the whole idea was a voluntary system where
00:07:12.740 Indians would choose to be Canadian citizens. And as I say, it didn't work out. That is not
00:07:21.080 what happened. Then when the government tried to force enfranchisement, by that time, there were so
00:07:29.220 many monetary benefits to being a status Indian that it was very, very difficult to break through 0.59
00:07:38.240 that barrier. So is this why so many conservatives want to see the end of the status system?
00:07:46.080 Yes, yes, I think so. I think a conservative thinker wants a country where everybody has
00:07:52.540 exactly the same rights and that's what Canada was supposed to be. So what we have now is a person
00:08:01.860 can come in from India or China or Africa or something and they become a Canadian citizen
00:08:08.260 with exactly the same rights as everybody else. But we have this one group that is status Indians 0.99
00:08:15.260 who, for historical reasons, have an entirely different set of rights. 0.84
00:08:22.240 So I think a conservative says, no, that's not the way it should be.
00:08:26.060 And we see what's playing out in B.C. as pretty strong evidence
00:08:32.960 that having one racial group with different rights is definitely not good for the country. 0.99
00:08:41.640 So, all right, it's pretty obvious then why conservatives are against the reserve system,
00:08:46.700 but Mr. Canu, Premier of Manitoba, he is indigenous, and he has said within the last few days
00:08:53.340 that it's time for the reserve system to be wound up, the Indian Act scrapped,
00:08:57.820 and something different would emerge. Now, he's NDP. It's improbable that the left wants to get
00:09:05.460 rid of the Indian Act for the same reason that you or I might. So what's their angle?
00:09:13.540 Well, I think Wab Kanu told us, he said that he showed us his status card and said,
00:09:24.420 this is a race-based card, and it is treating Indians as really—he's now—I'm paraphrasing
00:09:35.380 now, trying to explain why the left might find this argument appealing. He's saying we should 0.98
00:09:44.020 not have a system that discriminates against one racial group. All racial groups should be treated
00:09:53.460 equally. And I agree with him completely on that, but I'm not sure he knew exactly what he was
00:09:59.940 saying because it wasn't just the status cards that are race-based. The entire Indian system
00:10:06.260 is race-based. So if he wants to make that point, I'm happy to vote for him. If he's going to say 1.00
00:10:16.980 we cannot have a race-based system in Canada, in other words, the entire Indian system,
00:10:22.500 and that would include section 35. That would include all of the special laws that Indians have 0.96
00:10:30.340 and the special perks that Indians have that others don't. I would agree with him completely,
00:10:35.380 but I don't think that's what he meant to say. All right. Well, Mr. Carney obviously had to
00:10:41.860 think it through as well, because when he was caught in a scrum and asked what he thought
00:10:45.540 about this he said it's probably time to get rid of it or talk about reform and so on and then he
00:10:54.180 backpedaled a day later and said no i i don't see the act uh disappearing but i i can i can picture
00:11:01.860 reforms so what do you think mr carney thought about first when he was actually willing to
00:11:11.220 consider what Wob Canoe was saying. Well, I'm going to be a bit cynical here. I think if Mr.
00:11:19.660 Carney thought they could simply modernize the act, rename it with other nicer names,
00:11:27.860 more modern names, let's say call it the Indigenous Sovereignty Act and formally rename
00:11:33.860 reserves to First Nations and things like that and doctor it up a little bit, I think he would be
00:11:40.920 all for it because that could be done with the consent of all of the Indian groups and
00:11:50.760 that would be a political win for him. But to truly abolish the Indian Act
00:11:56.840 and the Indian system as Wab Kanu seems to be suggesting, that means opening up the Constitution.
00:12:05.160 that means opening up section 35 and i i do not believe that prime minister carney is going to
00:12:14.300 willingly open up the constitution because anything can happen what does section 35 mean
00:12:20.820 for the indigenous people section 35 uh it says that as of 1982 uh existing
00:12:30.800 existing, and I stress that word, Aboriginal rights, were to be protected in the Constitution.
00:12:41.140 Now, that section has a very interesting history, and I'll just spend a minute on that if you like.
00:12:47.660 That was not supposed to be there. That is not part of the package that Pierre Trudeau
00:12:52.860 originally gave to the premiers. As a matter of fact, in the original package that Pierre
00:13:00.620 Trudeau gave. Section 35 was not there at all. And constitutional protection of property rights
00:13:11.180 was. Now, this is where our premiers made a very bad mistake. In my opinion, they turfed out,
00:13:22.260 except for B.C.'s Bennett. He was the only one who stood up for property rights. The other ones
00:13:32.700 all sold it away. And at the same time, they were, I'm going to say, snuckered into accepting
00:13:39.200 Section 35. They originally refused to accept it. But when the word existing was put in,
00:13:47.120 And they were assured that a Supreme Court would never add additional Aboriginal rights.
00:13:56.080 Only then did they sign.
00:13:58.000 What they didn't understand is that the Supreme Court would go on to do exactly that.
00:14:03.380 And the Supreme Court would invent entirely new rights such as Aboriginal title and duty to consult.
00:14:09.840 So I think our premiers, in retrospect, were not very careful. They were too hasty in doing what
00:14:19.600 they did. So Mr. Knud said that he despised the act because it was race-based, but so much of the
00:14:28.720 advancement of indigenous peoples in the last 40 years, 50 years, has been because of a race-based
00:14:37.440 approach to their politics of the very fact that we have
00:14:44.320 land transfers happening on the scale of their happening in british columbia
00:14:50.480 and that the federal government is working hand in hand with indigenous peoples on things such as
00:14:59.600 the musqueam agreement in which they agree that certain territory is a certain territory in this
00:15:06.160 case being the larger part of greater vancouver is is indian land and that's of course protected
00:15:14.400 by section 35 if we if it's ever challenged why i wonder would mr canoe be in such a pet about
00:15:24.240 it being race-based when race-based is working for them well yeah that that that was my that
00:15:31.440 was my point I'm not sure he well he's a very smart man so maybe he knew exactly what he was
00:15:37.280 talking about but the fact is that Canada was was supposed to be a country of individual rights
00:15:45.680 when the treaties had to be signed obviously they had to those are collective rights and the treaties
00:15:52.640 gave Indians those collective rights. But as of 1982, the actual collective rights owned by
00:16:04.480 Aboriginal people were very, very limited. And the treaties gave Indians the right to hunt and fish
00:16:12.160 on unoccupied crown lands surrounding their reserves until it was needed, until land was
00:16:19.600 needed by the government for other purposes. But that's really all, plus the $5 a year that they
00:16:25.280 got as compensation. But our Supreme Court has, for reasons which I do not understand,
00:16:32.720 particularly beginning in the Delgamucchio case in 1997, chosen to just massively expand
00:16:41.520 the collective, another word for collective is tribal rights of people. They invented,
00:16:48.560 literally invented Aboriginal title and they invented duty to consult. So it is the Supreme 0.81
00:16:55.680 Court that is responsible for really creating the situation we see now playing out in BC,
00:17:07.760 where you can actually have race-based
00:17:10.720 chunks of the province given over to a particular tribe. This should never have happened,
00:17:21.380 but it is happening today. So exactly how Mr. Knue, what he thinks of that from his past
00:17:30.760 statements, I think he's just fine with it. I certainly am not, and there are many others like
00:17:36.700 who thinks that we are definitely going in the wrong direction and we have to get back to being
00:17:42.940 a country of equals where collective rights are basically very, very limited.
00:17:51.660 Well, I suppose we gave up the idea of being a country of equals when we established this
00:17:55.820 back in 1876. I mean, the goals as you explained them were commendable, but clearly as long as
00:18:03.580 somebody is in tutelage they they're not the equal of the person who the student is not the
00:18:09.580 equal of the of the teacher well i agree with you but but i'd say that that was very clearly meant
00:18:16.620 to be a a temporary situation whether the uh canada's founders uh did the right thing or not
00:18:24.620 i'm not you know i'm not in a position to say my personal view is that they should not have put
00:18:30.140 Indians in a separate legal category right from the beginning. They should have given them help
00:18:35.180 in various ways, but they should not have put them in a different legal category. But they did,
00:18:42.540 but they did, and they meant that it would be temporary. They tried after that in 1920, 1933,
00:18:51.740 in 1969 to undo what they had done and to take away the rights. But once you give people
00:19:01.580 special privileges, especially expensive ones, it's very difficult to take it back.
00:19:09.280 Well, that of course is the thing, isn't it? If there are going to be, I mean, sometimes the
00:19:13.840 complaint is that the Indian Act is restrictive, but it also delivers benefits, so much so in fact 0.95
00:19:20.140 that there's now such a thing as a pretendian somebody who wants status because those benefits
00:19:25.660 and some interesting people have put their names forward and been exposed as frauds but seriously
00:19:31.980 as you once you give benefits it's colossally difficult to remove them so if there are benefits
00:19:40.040 to being an indigenous person, there has to be a way to determine who qualifies. 0.98
00:19:48.520 So does that not mean that the Indian Act is with us for good?
00:19:57.920 Well, not necessarily. 1.00
00:20:02.640 The plan was to gradually eliminate the number of status Indians. 1.00
00:20:10.480 And now there are court fights to try to increase the number of status Indians. 0.98
00:20:18.380 Like everybody who is even partly related to a person of indigenous ancestry sort of wants to get on. 0.90
00:20:30.740 and I'm going to use a crude term here, but the gravy train. 1.00
00:20:36.000 So we have Métis groups. 0.99
00:20:37.700 We have the second generation cutoff people. 0.99
00:20:40.980 We've got a lot of Indians now aren't really Indians. 0.97
00:20:48.480 Within any country, people intermarry,
00:20:51.480 and the average status Indian,
00:20:53.580 Most status Indians have non-Indian people in their bloodlines, and in many cases, they can be like one-sixth or one-eighth or even one-twentieth Indian and now want to call themselves indigenous.
00:21:13.340 And it's not just to get the special health benefits or education benefits, that sort of thing, which don't come from the Indian Act, by the way. 0.64
00:21:23.320 That's basically well-meaning politicians and judges granting those special privileges.
00:21:30.760 But there are special, at some universities, if you could say you're Indigenous, then you get to the head of the line to get these very nice jobs, etc. 0.97
00:21:40.400 So, yes, we have now a number of people who have been sort of outed because they're not Indians at all. 1.00
00:21:50.460 And they're in there just to get the benefits. 1.00
00:21:54.540 Those are the pure pretendians. 0.99
00:21:57.180 But if you notice, when you look at the spokespeople for Indian people, most of them are awfully white looking. 0.99
00:22:07.000 Some of them are not very Indian at all.
00:22:09.400 And so we're getting to this point where what a person who calls himself an Indian might not have much indigenous ancestry at all. 0.51
00:22:21.500 Well, maybe that's why Wob Canu is not, I mean, he very clearly is.
00:22:26.460 So maybe he's just fed up with the people pretending.
00:22:30.820 uh he there's one thing that we should just mention about premier canoe is that uh he took
00:22:38.900 the occasion to say that so-called residential school denialism was detestable but it shouldn't
00:22:48.100 be criminalized now this puts him very much off message with the rest of the aboriginal industry
00:22:55.060 We have senators, we have MPs who are actually trying to make it illegal to question the residential school narrative.
00:23:05.060 So is there more to Mr. Canu than we have really been giving him credit for?
00:23:10.920 I'm not sure, Nigel, because at the same time that he said that denialism
00:23:18.680 should not be a crime, he also stood in the former grounds of the Brandon Residential School
00:23:29.080 and pointed to graves and said, here are the graves as if referring to those Kamloops graves
00:23:36.120 or secretly buried children in graves, etc. And the fact is that he was implying that a crime had
00:23:43.800 been committed there. And that's totally false because those were simply children who had died
00:23:50.520 of tuberculosis mainly. And they were a tiny fraction of the thousands who had died on the
00:23:57.240 reserve. So there was no crime committed. This was just a fact of life. Death was ever present
00:24:04.520 in those days, particularly within the Indian community. So Wab Kanu was really misrepresenting
00:24:12.040 facts there. So when he says, yes, there shouldn't be a law against denialism, well, that's very true.
00:24:22.600 But when he pretends that unless you believe a crime has been committed at the
00:24:28.760 Brandon School or any other school just because a child died of a disease there, that is twisting
00:24:38.620 the truth. So I take issue with Mr. Canoo on that one, and I'm not exactly sure what his true
00:24:46.400 thinking is. We're out of time, Brian, but I'll leave you with the last word. Do you think we'll
00:24:51.980 ever get rid of the Indian Act? I think Canada has to. At some point, Canada has to bite the 1.00
00:25:03.500 bullet and do all of the expensive and very difficult things in finally phasing out what
00:25:12.500 is a race-based system that has no place in a modern country like Canada. But it's going to be 0.60
00:25:18.300 a very difficult process. And I don't think I'll be allowed around to see it, Nigel.
00:25:27.740 Okay. So buy them out is the solution. All right. Well, look, thank you, Brian. Appreciate you.
00:25:35.900 Listeners should know that Brian interrupted his vacation to deal with this while it was
00:25:40.260 still a current issue. So thank you again for that. Okay. That's happy to be here, Nigel.
00:25:47.500 Well good good to have you with us for the Western Standard. I'm Nigel Hannaford